The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

She had read a wonderful play about a man who scratched on the wall of his cell and she had felt that was true of life — one scratched on the wall.

Beauty was not everything. Beauty had this penalty — it came too readily, came too completely. It stilled life — froze it.

Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!

every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.

more and more I come to loathe any dominion of one over another; any leadership, any imposition of the will.